My office workstation recently went trough a Slackware release upgrade by following the excellent systemupgrade article from the Slackware Documentation Project. Personally I experienced a few snags along the way so I’ll add a few notes for future reference.
Time for another unfortunate run in with the OTRS 5 Daemon. Again I got a call from a customer informing me that OTRS had been idle for a day without creating any new tickets.
Just because Greg KH said that all users of the 4.4 kernel series must upgrade ;-) I’m happy to report that everything seems to be working as expected and have yet to notice any regressions.
Dlackware is not your average “GNOME for Slackware” project but instead aims to take the slack out of Slackware. What you get in return is the latest in “enterprise” technology. Dlackware delivers a fully functional GNOME 3.22 desktop with PAM, Wayland and systemd.
These steps are partly dependent on my personal Gentoo installation and should not be viewed as a general recipe. Please refer to the official Gentoo wiki on the topic instead. I’m using genkernel to generate an initramfs and GRUB2 as my boot loader.
With all the noise lately about Dirty COW (CVE-2016-5195) and the lack of patched kernels from Slackware’s “Benevolent Dictator for Life”, I decided it was time to roll up the sleeves and get it done. Since Slackware doesn’t have a “sophisticated” build system and all that grease, it’s a trivial matter to step up to the plate and take responsibility for your own system. I’ll be using “vanilla-kernelversion” as my tag for the kernel and initrd. Also notice that I build my kernels as a normal user.
I was playing around with an open source video editor named OpenShot when I suddenly felt a familiar shiver going down my spine. I felt the unmistakable presence of evil, and it was coming from inside my own computer. ‘You will know me as the Google Analytics measurement protocol’ the beast answered upon detection.
After four months of hosting this WordPress blog on a RPi3 I have yet to experience a single issue. No filesystem errors, no kernel oops’s and no hard freezes. Definitely an enjoyable change of pace from the preceding twelve months of hosting this site on a Raspberry Pi 2.
I’ve not been doing any overclocking whatsoever on this device and I believe that to be the decisive factor when it comes to improved stability. My old RPi2 is pretty much useless at this point and I’m guessing it simply got burned out before its time. As for storage, I’m still using a SanDisk MicroSDHC Ultra UHS-I 32GB card.
Configuring and using a generic kernel on EFI-based platforms with ELILO is pretty much an identical exercise to using LILO with legacy systems. Slackware provides you with a mkinitrd generator script to assist in making an initrd image to boot your system.
While trying to install a RapidSSL wildcard certificate on our Zimbra 8 server a while back, I ran into some issues while using Zimbra’s zmcertmgr command:
Some unfortunate but understandable news emerged on the Slackware ARM website today as ARM maintainer Stuart Winter released the following announcement:
This WordPress blog is now hosted on a Raspberry Pi 3 after a year of running on a Raspberry Pi 2. Unlike with the RPi2, I’ve not done any overclocking on this device. I’m hoping that decision will decrease the number of file system related issues and obscure kernel oopses I’ve experienced lately, but I guess time will tell.
Let’s get ready to rumble: a battle of two Slackware ARM powered webservers.
Hosting your WordPress installation on a RPi2 can be a challenge on multiple levels. Apart from stability issues, my biggest concern is always subpar PHP performance and additional overhead with TLS connections. To determine the potential gain of upgrading my hosting platform to a RPi3, I’ve done a few tests with a MicroSD card I recently retired due to data corruption.
Since I hit the one year mark today I thought I would do a quick update on my RPi2 project. A short recap to kick things off: the project had a rough start due to some overly ambitious overclocking that eventually resulted in severe data corruption. However, after implementing the necessary modifications I enjoyed close to 300 days of easy uptime before a power failure took the RPi2 down. My initial thought after the power failure was that everything was still dandy, but a few weeks later things started to go downhill fast. It all began with a few file system errors:
So this website was pretty much free of trackers with one notable exception, the fonts provided by the Twenty Fifteen theme. By its use of the Google Fonts API, most visitors were still leaking data back to the great chocolate factory. However, as the fonts are open source we’re free to use them outside of Google’s realm.
‘Tis the season to be cracking.
In the webhosting business we’re used to seeing an increase in attacks during the holidays, as most people by then are busy with real life. If you’re a cracker though, this is your favorite time of the year.
SimpleScreenRecorder (ssr) is a feature-rich screen recorder for Linux that supports X11 and OpenGL. SimpleScreenRecorder is available as a SlackBuild script from slackbuilds.org, but by only installing the listed dependency, namely FFmpeg, you’ll end up with a rather limited set of supported codecs.
By now most people have gotten up to speed with latest news regarding the attack against the Linux Mint infrastructure and the ripples it created within the Mint community. If not, here is yet another quick and superficial recap:
Due to a city wide power outage I lost just short of 300 days of uptime on the RPi2. The RPi2 did boot back up when the power returned, but since I had received a new IP address I needed to make a DNS update before the server was reachable again. That’s obviously the downside of running a server on a dynamic IP space, but hey it doesn’t cost me a cent. I have a 300 seconds TTL (Time To Live) on my blog.paranoidpenguin.net A record so I think it’s good enough for a hobby project.
The symptom is rather ominous, your wp-content/cache/supercache folder is suddenly populated by additional domain name folders having no connection to your website. What could have caused this? Has your website been compromised or is there some reasonable explanation for this behavior.